The Golden Notebook

Author Anna Wulf attempts to overcome writer’s block by writing a comprehensive "golden notebook" that draws together the preoccupations of her life, each of which is examined in a different notebook. Anna’s struggle to unify the various strands of her life – emotional, political, and professional – amasses into a fascinating encyclopaedia of female experience in the ‘50s.

The Fifth Child

Harriet and David Lovatt, parents of four children, have created an idyll of domestic bliss in defiance of the social trends of late 1960s England. While around them crime and unrest surge, the Lovatts are certain that their old-fashioned contentment can protect them from the world outside - until the birth of their fifth baby. Gruesomely goblin-like in appearance, insatiably hungry, abnormally strong and violent, Ben has nothing innocent or infant-like about him.

Here I Am: A Novel

Unfolding over four tumultuous weeks in present-day Washington, DC, Here I Am is the story of a fracturing family in a moment of crisis. As Jacob and Julia Bloch and their three sons are forced to confront the distances between the lives they think they want and the lives they are living, a catastrophic earthquake sets in motion a quickly escalating conflict in the Middle East. At stake is the meaning of home - and the fundamental question of how much aliveness one can bear.

Zero K

Jeffrey Lockhart's father, Ross, is a billionaire in his 60s with a younger wife, Artis Martineau, whose health is failing. Ross is the primary investor in a remote and secret compound where death is exquisitely controlled and bodies are preserved until a future time when biomedical advances and new technologies can return them to lives of transcendent promise. Jeff joins Ross and Artis at the compound to say "an uncertain farewell" to her as she surrenders her body.

Mrs. Dalloway

It is a June day in London in 1923, and the lovely Clarissa Dalloway is having a party. Whom will she see? Her friend Peter, back from India, who has never really stopped loving her? What about Sally, with whom Clarissa had her life’s happiest moment? Meanwhile, the shell-shocked Septimus Smith is struggling with his life on the same London day.

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood

One of the comedy world's fastest-rising stars tells his wild coming of age story during the twilight of apartheid in South Africa and the tumultuous days of freedom that followed. Noah provides something deeper than traditional memoirists: powerfully funny observations about how farcical political and social systems play out in our lives.

My Life as a Man

At its heart lies the marriage of Peter and Maureen Tarnopol, a gifted young writer and the woman who wants to be his muse but who instead is his nemesis. Their union is based on fraud and shored up by moral blackmail, but it is so perversely durable that, long after Maureen’s death, Peter is still trying—and failing—to write his way free of it.

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets

When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing "a new kind of literary genre", describing her work as "a history of emotions - a history of the soul". Alexievich's distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely given the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation.

The Sound and the Fury

First published in 1929, Faulkner created his "heart's darling", the beautiful and tragic Caddy Compson, whose story Faulkner told through separate monologues by her three brothers: the idiot Benjy, the neurotic suicidal Quentin, and the monstrous Jason.

The Glass Bead Game

Set in the 23rd century, The Glass Bead Game is the story of Joseph Knecht, who has been raised in Castalia, which has provided for the intellectual elite to grow and flourish. Since childhood, Knecht has been consumed with mastering the Glass Bead Game, which requires a synthesis of aesthetics and scientific arts, such as mathematics, music, logic, and philosophy, which he achieves in adulthood, becoming a Magister Ludi (Master of the Game).

The Sympathizer: A Novel

Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, 2016. It is April 1975, and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong.

Stoner

William Stoner is born at the end of the 19th century into a dirt-poor Missouri farming family. Sent to the state university to study agronomy, he instead falls in love with English literature and embraces a scholar's life, far different from the hardscrabble existence he has known. And yet as the years pass, Stoner encounters a succession of disappointments.

Culture and Imperialism

A landmark work from the intellectually auspicious author of Orientalism, this book explores the long-overlooked connections between the Western imperial endeavor and the culture that both reflected and reinforced it. This classic study, the direct successor to Said's main work, is read by Peter Ganim (Orientalism).

Orientalism

This landmark book, first published in 1978, remains one of the most influential books in the Social Sciences, particularly Ethnic Studies and Postcolonialism. Said is best known for describing and critiquing "Orientalism", which he perceived as a constellation of false assumptions underlying Western attitudes toward the East. In Orientalism Said claimed a "subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture."

Their Eyes Were Watching God

Why we think it’s a great listen: Zora Neale Hurston’s classic novel begs to be read aloud, and Ruby Dee answers the challenge with utter perfection, capturing the wide range of characters and their diverse accents with grace and power. Their Eyes Were Watching God is the luminous and haunting novel about Janie Crawford, a Southern Black woman in the 1930s, whose journey from a free-spirited girl to a woman of independence and substance has inspired writers and readers for close to 70 years.

A Room of One's Own

A Room of One's Own, based on a lecture given at Girton College Cambridge, is one of the great feminist polemics. Woolf's blazing polemic on female creativity, the role of the writer, and the silent fate of Shakespeare's imaginary sister remains a powerful reminder of a woman's need for financial independence and intellectual freedom.

Norwegian by Night

Sheldon Horowitz - 82 years old, impatient, and unreasonable - is staying with his granddaughter's family in Norway when he disappears with a stranger's child. Sheldon is an ex-Marine, and he feels responsible for his son's death in Vietnam. Recently widowed and bereft, he talks to the ghosts of his past constantly. To Norway's cops, Sheldon is just an old man who is coming undone at the end of a long and hard life. But Sheldon is clear in his own mind.

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

In White Trash, Nancy Isenberg upends assumptions about America's supposedly class-free society. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early 19th century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ's Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty.

Short Stories: The Thoroughly Modern Collection

Twenty-three stories, all unabridged, from a diverse group of star writers and readers. A truly memorable collection with a wide appeal. Includes "The Years Midnight" by Helen Simpson, read by Harriet Walter; "On Seeing the 100% Perfect Girl One Beautiful Morning" by Haruki Marukami, read by Walter Lewis; "Bablady" by A. S. Byatt, read by Roslaind Eyres; "Hotel des Vaoyaguerus" by William Boyd, read by Martin Jarvis; and "Who?" by Fay Weldon, read by Julie Christie.

Brighton Rock

Originally published in 1938, Graham Greene’s chilling exposé of violence and gang warfare is a masterpiece of psychological realism and often considered Graham Greene’s best novel. It is a fascinating study of evil, sin, and the “appalling strangeness of the mercy of God,” a classic of its kind.

Norwegian Wood

This stunning and elegiac novel by the author of the internationally acclaimed Wind-Up Bird Chronicle has sold over four million copies in Japan and is now available to American audiences for the first time. It is sure to be a literary event.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Universally acclaimed from the time it was first published in 1968, Slouching Towards Bethlehem has been admired for decades as a stylistic masterpiece. Academy Award-winning actress Diane Keaton (Annie Hall, The Family Stone) performs these classic essays, including the title piece, which will transport the listener back to a unique time and place: the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco during the neighborhood’s heyday as a countercultural center.

The Fire Next Time

At once a powerful evocation of his early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice to both the individual and the body politic, James Baldwin galvanized the nation in the early days of the civil rights movement with this eloquent manifesto. The Fire Next Time stands as one of the essential works of our literature.

Native Son

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic.

Publisher's Summary

In contemporary London, a loose-knit group of political vagabonds drifts from one cause to the next, picketing and strategizing for hypothetical situations. But within this world, one particular small commune is moving inexorably toward active terrorism.

At its center is Alice Mellings, a brilliant organizer who knows how to cope with almost anything, except the vacuum of her own life. Always reliable, she makes herself indispensable to the commune, earning a precious sense of belonging by denying her own sense of self.

But now, suddenly, the stakes are rising. Some in the group appear to have ties to insurgents in Northern Ireland and even to Soviets who are "recruiting." A small bomb set off on a deserted street leads to ideas that are dangerously ambitious, and there is a "professional" who is eager to meet with Alice and discuss her future with his organization.

The story moves very slowly, and things really only start to happen in the final act, yet I was never bored by this book. Doris Lessing's writing is like one of the finer social satirists of the 19th or early 20th century, writing about contemporary events, or at least contemporary for the 1980s, when this book was written. The Good Terrorist is about Alice Mellings, who is, with great and lasting irony, exactly the sort of comfy-making, boo-boo kissing motherly type as her own mother was, even though Alice is now a "revolutionary" who spits on everything her horrible, awful, no-good bourgeois parents stand for, when she isn't begging them for money (and stealing from them when they won't give it).

The grown woman of solidly middle-class Brits, Alice was given everything by her parents, including a good university education. But we learn that her fractured relationship with both mother and father (who are themselves divorced) is at the root of all Alice's discontents. Now her father is remarried and running a business and trying to wash his hands of his problem child of a grown daughter, and her mother has turned into an impoverished alcoholic. Alice's interactions with her parents are painful because it's one of those situations where an outside observer can easily see that if just one of them would bend, just a little bit, they could make peace, but they always manage to say exactly the wrong things to each other, and neither Alice nor her parents ever have the emotional maturity to talk like grown-ups without verbal knives drawn.

When not being reduced to an eternally rebellious teenager in the presence of her parents, Alice is a whirlwind of industriousness and hard work ethic, even though it's all applied to keeping an "approved tenancy" in which she and her fellow communist "revolutionaries" are squatting from being demolished by the council. Her co-revolutionaries are all freeloading under-achievers like Alice, the difference being that she could easily make something of her life, while most of her "comrades" are just plain losers.

But amidst all their "organizing" and "protesting" and "sticking it to the fat capitalist pigs," a plan gradually emerges to work with either the IRA or with their revolutionary Russian comrades. At first this seems like as much a joke as any of their other plans, since Alice is the only one who ever actually does anything, and she's mostly doing housework and den-mothering all these wannabes. What would the IRA or the Soviets want with a bunch of idiots like these? But if you insist on being a useful idiot long enough, someone will use you, and like shadows at the edges of a campfire, the real actors out there begin to come circling.

The Good Terrorist isn't a suspense novel or a spy thriller or a crime caper. It's a character drama, with a bunch of interesting characters who are all much alike except in that they are each individuals with their own problems and quirks, and they're all kind of unlikable idiots, even before they start getting in over their heads with real bad guys. Only Alice is sympathetic, and she's still as much of a fool and a naif as the rest of them, it's just that in her case, we can see all the wasted energy and potential. Her entire life has been spent in a kind of dreamworld, living for other people, being shaped by other people's opinions of her, and deliberately looking away from ugly reality. She's too good for the people around her, but she also pretty much deserves what she gets.

I might have wished there was a bit more action, maybe a twist or two, but The Good Terrorist held my attention and Doris Lessing's writing had no real weakness other than a leisurely in-no-hurry-to-get-anywhere pace. This wasn't an exciting book and the plot is only there to make the characters do things while we get to know them, but the day-to-day mundanity of the story is deceptive, and if that's all you see, you're missing the point, which is the banality of evil and the obligation of anyone who wants to consider themselves a "good" person to not do nothing when other people are doing things you know are wrong. I'll definitely read more by Lessing; she delivers wonderful characterization with sharp, straight-faced black humor. This book is like a verbal confection of delicate (and indelicate) interpersonal dialog and nuanced character studies. With a bomb at the center.

Excellent reading by Nadia May, who turns breathless and shrill when Alice is getting excited, and down-to-earth and calm and properly British when Alice is being her more reasonable self, and basically injected the right degree of emotion into each scene, really bringing Alice and her inner life alive.

The Good Terrorist could have been written last night. Its details are that close, threat lurking subtly as but one of many possibilities . Lessing brilliantly stays aloof from judgment: the characters indight themselves with charm, but there's nothing charming about the book's relentless, Inevitable conclusion.

I've always wondered why the English put up with "squatting" which has never been put up with let alone encouraged in this country. Perhaps we built free housing at too rapid a rate. The book is not about this but gives much insite into the impact of homelessness whether caused by society or by individuals themselves. It dwells on one reason not to work which is to be critical of the shortcommings of everyone who does. This is a wonderful "think-piece" for which the author was justifiably famous.

There was an exciting moment near the end, but for the most part this was dull, dull, dull. Just a bunch of young people who aren't very smart planning rebellion. The topic could've been so interesting...